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PARIS — A rail joint that worked loose from a track switching point appears to have caused
France’s worst train accident in years, an official of a national rail company said yesterday.

The crowded train, leaving Paris at rush hour before a holiday weekend for the city of Limoges,
jumped the track 20 miles south at Bretigny-sur-Orge station. The seven-car train broke in two, and
some cars rode up the station platform and flipped.

Six people died. Yesterday, two were in critical condition, and seven others were in serious
condition, officials said; 21 more were still in the hospital. More than 190 people were treated at
the site for lesser injuries.

Officials said the death toll might increase as the wreckage is removed.

Railway investigators discovered that a metal clip joining two rails as part of the switch,
which guides trains from one track to another, had worked loose and moved from its normal position,
said Pierre Izard, the director for infrastructure at the national rail company, SNCF.

“It moved into the center of the switch,” Izard told reporters at the scene. “And in this
position, it prevented the normal passage of the train’s wheels and seems to have caused the
derailment.”

The president of the SNCF, Guillaume Pepy, said engineers will check the condition of 5,000
similar switches along the rail network.

The first two cars of the train seemed to have passed along the tracks without difficulty, but
the third car was the first to derail, about 200 yards before the station. The train had left Paris
21 minutes earlier, packed with 385 people, and was not scheduled to stop at the station.

Officials said work had been performed this month on the track. The switch was last inspected on
July 4, railway officials said, and another train had passed safely over the same track a half-hour
before the crash.

A minute of silence was held at noon yesterday on all French trains and in all stations for the
victims of the accident.